The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Situation Hopeless at Bristol-Myers

We at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab think cancer is Bad. We think Lance Armstrong is Good. We think the champion cyclist's survival of testicular cancer is Good, too.

We also think it's Good for Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY Quote) to sell cancer-fighting medicines used by Lance Armstrong and others.

Despite all that, we at the Lab are astounded by the utter stupidity of an advertisement that Bristol-Myers ran this week following Armstrong's fifth-straight Tour de France victory.

We're talking about a full-page, full-color ad the pharmaceutical company took out Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. The ad congratulates Armstrong, mentions Bristol-Myers' role in his recovery and promotes the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope. That's a forthcoming Los Angeles-to-Washington, D.C., bike trip intended to "create cancer awareness and support ... for cancer patients and their families."

All well and good, except for one little thing: the "Tour of Hope" logo in the bottom left-hand corner of the ad.

Like other versions of the Tour of Hope logotype, the newspaper variation features a picture of the sun in place of the "o" in "Hope." Nothing wrong with that.

No, the problem is that this time around, someone decided to superimpose over that sun a silhouette of a cyclist with upraised arms.

Perfectly appropriate, given Armstrong's recent victory. But it's problematic, too.

See, the cyclist -- like the nearby "H," "P" and "E" -- is rendered in dark blue, a coloration that overpowers the pale yellow sun.